Smash Episode-12 Recap: “It’s Like a Demented Fairy Tale”

It’s always seemed to me that a show like Smash—which is about the creation of an over-the-top musical based on the life of one of the most over-the-top characters in film history—should be . . . well, over-the-top. It’s got beautiful people with incredible talent. It’s set in the most glamorous city in the world. Its characters burst into song for absolutely no reason. In public. This show should be larger than life.

But somehow, it’s not. Most of it, in fact, is regular old, normal-sized life. Glee, the pioneering musical-theater-porn program that made Smashpossible, is an inconsistent, embarrassing disaster. But at least its writers know that in order to sell all that singing, they need to present a somewhat cartoonish version of reality. Smash insists upon forcing us to look at the ugly, mundane minutiae of its characters’ lives while still believing that said characters would end up belting out Rihanna songs alongside dancing puppets in Times Square—all while wearing angel wings.

The entrance of Uma Thurman’s character, Rebecca Duvall, has almost blessedly busted this conundrum wide open. She’s a movie star; by nature she is larger than life. She blasts through everyone else’s discrete little problems, scorching the characters with her fame and adding some desperately needed fun.

We open with Derek admitting to Karen that she’d make “a brilliant” Marilyn. “I see it, you know. In my head.” What Karen doesn’t know is that he actually sees it—like, he’s suffering from hallucinations. (Of course, he’s not the only one.) Ivy and Ellis overhear this exchange and plot to sabotage Karen. Ellis goes first, telling Rebecca’s agent (the one he slept with, with the ginger combover) that Karen could be competition for the movie star. Apparently the agent did not know that since Karen is the understudy, it is literally her job to wait in the wings and hope Rebecca gets sick or even dies from a peanut allergy.

Rebecca’s been arriving late and causing problems, which gets everyone into a tizzy—Derek’s masculinity is threatened, the stage managers start making kale smoothies, and Tom breaks a pencil. But for some reason, little innocent Karen still likes her, because “she’s very direct.” On the way out of rehearsal Rebecca spots Karen and asks her to hang out, even though Karen is wearing a highly objectionable jacket that is 90% front.

That night they go to Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, where Rebecca (the giant movie star) is apparently a regular. She makes Karen get up and sing “Run,” by Snow Patrol, which involves a lot of auto-tuned screaming. Everyone loves it, even Rebecca, who gasps, “You’re not an understudy. You’re a star!” After a night where they end up at a celebrity-filled “restaurant in Dumbo” which appears to be called “Rainstorm,” Karen ends up in Page Six as “Rebecca’s Gal Pal.” Rebecca’s a well-known heterosexual in her middle age—but hey, if it could happen to Anne Heche . . .

Their budding relationship causes problems between Karen and Dev. “Take it from me, boyfriends can be a problem on the way up,” Rebecca cautions. Then she helps Karen get a new solo and gives her a bunch of Diana Ross’s hand-me-downs.

Karen’s reaction to all this excitement made me finally realize why they cast Katherine McPhee—someone who looks, sounds, and acts nothing like Marilyn Monroe—in this lead role. She does have a rube’s air to her; as a viewer you believe her when she assures Dev that her club-hopping relationship with Rebecca is “fantastic,” “exciting,” and “cool,” rather than ominous, hangover-inducing, and de-humanizing. She’s like a cherub, if a cherub were a size two and always had a perfect blow-out.

Eventually Karen tries to stage a détentebetween Dev and Rebecca by taking them to dinner. Ivy calls this a bold move, since Karen’s “dating both of them.” Predictably it all goes awry, from the moment Rebecca displays mild xenophobia in the cheap Indian restaurant, to the end, when she and Dev get in a fight about how Dev is going to get in the way of Karen being a star.

AND THEN, something amazing happens.

Karen is so thrilled by the dramatic fight between her two suitors that she daydreams herself into a complex Bollywood dance number. I know most of you probably hated this, but I appreciated it for what it was trying to do. It made absolutely no sense. (Why was the rest of the cast in her daydream? What did the lyrics about “a thousand and one nights” even mean? Why was Ellis dressed as Abu from Aladdin? O.K., I’ll give them that last one.) But at least it was an effort to be campy and humorous, and to poke fun at the idea that we’re watching a show about a bunch of normal people with musical Tourette syndrome. Bollywood films are the master of drama blended with megawatt camp, and the reference—while also perhaps mildly xenophobic—was apt. Also, Karen does a decent Bhangra hybrid, the song is pretty catchy—and it was entertaining to finally watch the self-serious Dev act completely ridiculously.

(This video also features excellent usage of the Angel Orensanz Foundation building, the oldest synagogue in New York City.) At some point in the episode, Ivy calls the whole thing “a demented fairy tale,” which, let’s be honest, it is.

But just as all this silly, schmaltzy fun was going on, the dreary, serious plotlines continued apace. Eileen took Nick on a date to BAM, where they saw some boring performance art and ran into Jerry and his underage model date. Then they went home to have sex at his apartment, which is inexplicably filled with whale art.

Leo tricks Frank and Julia into thinking he’s staying with the other one and runs away for several days. They freak out and call the police, and finally Julia confronts Leo’s sketchy best friend outside of school. She threatens his private-school education by saying—and I loved this—“I’M FAMOUS.” The sketchy friend, quite rightly, observes that she is the one who “screwed up [her] life so bad [she has] to run around threatening loser teenagers.” Turns out Leo’s been sleeping on the kid’s floor, and eventually he returns to have dinner with Frank and Julia, and everything is better.

Ellis and Ivy trick Karen into missing her solo on “Secondhand White Baby Grand,” the saccharine ballad Tom and Julia wrote to take the performing burden off Rebecca. It goes to Ivy instead. Derek, who has been threatened by Rebecca during the whole episode, asserts his control again. The episode ends with Ivy singing the song, which is basically about broken things becoming lovely and useful again. It applies to Julia and Frank’s family, Eileen’s recovered confidence, and Ivy’s return to glory. It’s a nice moment, which Rebecca deftly ruins with a classic, Miranda-Priestly-at-the-end-of-Devil-Wears-Prada snipe. She gently demands to sing that song, and with that, she’s back in control again.